Numerical study of evaluating the optical quality of supersonic flow fields.

A numerical method based on the uniform and hexahedral grids generated from computational fluid dynamics is presented for the analysis of aero-optical performance. A single grid is taken as a cell with isotropy and homogeneity inside, and it is assumed that the light rays transmit grid by grid. Ray tracing is employed to track the transmission through the flow of supersonic fluids, and a recursive algorithm is derived. The line-of-sight errors and optical path differences produced by the mean density fields were calculated, the phase variances brought from the density fluctuations were computed, and the Strehl ratios were figured out. This method potentially provides a solution for the prediction of aero-optical effects.